The Quiet Twin

November 7, 2011
Set in Vienna during the first weeks of WWII, Vyleta’s captivating detective story, told from multiple perspectives, examines the paranoia and mistrust of neighbors during the height of Hitler’s regime. Neighborhood physician Dr. Anton Beer, a specialist in nervous disorders and forensics, is asked by his colleague, Dr. Speckstein, to investigate the death and disembowelment of his beloved pet dog. As the mystery of the slain dog deepens, it becomes apparent that the animal’s death may be tied to a serial killer in the city, or perhaps something even more sinister. Also central to the plot are Zuzka, Speckstein’s hypochondriac niece, who becomes fascinated with a mime living across the courtyard, and Anneliese Grotter, a hunchbacked seven-year-old with an alcoholic father. Anton and the two girls are on the verge of unraveling the mystery when Det. Franz Teuben, a zealous Nazi, begins to investigate the killings. Vyleta (Pavel & I) carefully provides political and historical context, resulting in a plot that takes a while to get going. However, when the pace picks up, readers will appreciate the novel’s well-crafted pathos, dark humor, and chills.

December 15, 2011
The residents of a Viennese neighborhood intersect over illness, murder and an increasingly intimidating Nazi presence. The second novel by Canadian novelist Vyleta (Pavel & I, 2008) is purposefully claustrophobic: Taking place over the course of a few weeks in 1939, the story rarely shifts from an apartment building where everybody seems to be sick or deeply eccentric. The sole exception is Dr. Anton Beer, the novel's hero, who's soon managing the concerns of three troubled women: Zuzka, a teenager whose claims of paralysis may just be a plea for romantic attention; Lieschen, a 9-year-old whose father is an alcoholic brute; and Eva, who genuinely suffers from paralysis, with the sickening bedsores to prove it. To this discomfiting milieu Vyleta adds a supporting cast of eccentrics, including Eva's brother, a cabaret performer, and a Japanese trumpeter who's creepily observant of the neighborhood's goings-on. The core plot involves a series of murders in the area, and Beer is increasingly pestered by a Nazi investigator looking for a patsy to attach to the crimes. But this book isn't so much a murder mystery as a mood piece about how paranoia escalates as a totalitarian regime comes to power, and some of the novel's best scenes underscore Dr. Beer's anxiety as a result of the growing surveillance of the apartment. Beer doesn't quite have the depth of character to carry the novel, unfortunately; over time, his stoic demeanor makes him seem less like a defiant hero than a passive blank. But Vyleta knows how to create an oppressive atmosphere without making the prose feel bogged down, and the novel's closing chapters pick up energy, revealing the evil of the Nazis and the ability of a few committed people to push back against it. An evocative if largely grey-toned portrait of life in a new police state.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

November 15, 2011

Set in Vienna in the fall of 1939, just as World War II is getting under way, Vyleta's (Pavel & I) novel focuses on residents of an apartment block where several unsolved murders have recently occurred. After Professor Speckstein's dog is killed, Dr. Anton Beer is brought in to examine his high-strung niece, Zuzka. As they gaze out her bedroom window, Zuzka shows Dr. Beer his neighbors as he's never seen them before. Besides Speckstein, the disgraced professor-turned-Nazi informant, there's Anneliese, a nine-year-old girl who lives with her alcoholic father; Yuu, a Japanese musician; and, at the center of it all, Otto Frei, a mysterious mime who lives with his quadriplegic sister, Eva, the quiet twin of the title. It is Eva who will bring the fates of all of these characters together after Zuzka discovers her, ill and uncared for, in Frei's apartment. VERDICT Working primarily through mood, atmospherics, and the general air of malevolence with which he surrounds the action, Vyleta memorably conjures up the darkness both of the times and of the Nazi mind.--Lawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, North Andover, MA

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from December 15, 2011
When the police show up to investigate the corpse in an apartment courtyard, they immediately tug on his hair to make sure it is not a wig. In the endlessly deceptive world Vyleta unfolds, such skepticism about appearances is essential. And no one needs such skepticism more than Herr Doktor Anton Beer, the novel's protagonist. Accustomed to dealing with the hidden illnesses lurking in the seemingly healthy and the feigned sicknesses of malingerers, this cagy physician unexpectedly finds himself prying for clues revealing who has recently butchered a local professor's dog and, perhaps with the same knife, also murdered four humans.Through Beer's sharp eyes, readers peer through peepholes, stare through parted curtains, catch fugitive images in mirrors, and scan stairwells, all the while assessing the inscrutable features of the residents of a Viennese apartment complex in 1939: a paralyzed woman shrouded in mysterious secrecy; her twin, a stealthy mime; a bookish Japanese trumpet player; a reclusive widow; an attractive hypochondriac; a drunken janitor. As Vyleta weaves his taut narrative, readers strive with Beer for that acuteness of vision necessary to anticipate and explain the ominous twists of events played out in the shadow of Nazi fanaticism. Dark and disturbing, a novel of rare sophistication.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)